


The Hampton Jitney to the End of the World

by aurilly



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Beach House, F/M, Zombie Apocalypse
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-08-09
Updated: 2014-08-09
Packaged: 2018-02-12 11:57:31
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,883
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2109024
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/aurilly/pseuds/aurilly
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In the aftermath of the zombie apocalypse, Bucky and Pepper are the only ones left. Surprisingly, this leads to a much more pleasant and luxurious existence than Bucky has ever known, and, oddly enough, just the right situation for the rest of his healing to flourish.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Hampton Jitney to the End of the World

**Author's Note:**

> There is no character death in the story, but the Avengers are missing, presumed dead. However, it might be okay, you never know... I like to think it is.

Bucky Barnes came back to life just in time to watch the world die. 

Wasn’t that just his luck?

It all happened too fast for anyone to figure out where ground zero was. The terms changed daily, from ‘sick’ to ‘walkers’ to ‘undead’ to ‘fuckers’, until there were too few humans left to care about the semantics. 

Buildings that had been built to withstand a long list of unlikely catastrophes were the only safe havens left. Stark Tower, rebuilt after hosting an intergalactic wormhole alien invasion—they kept telling Bucky that this actually happened, and he kept refusing to believe it—was one such building. With forty floors of weaponized barricades between the medical wing and the world on the streets below, Bucky managed to savor three days with Steve at his bedside before the Avengers were called out to help.

They never came back.

* * *

The geography that had helped the tri-state region prosper over the centuries served it poorly during a zombie apocalypse. The wide rivers and large bays made it difficult to escape. And there were so many people trying to escape. So many millions of people stranded on islands—Manhattan, Staten Island, Brooklyn and Queens, all the rest of Long Island. Their only way of getting to the mainland was through Manhattan. 

The walkers followed. 

Officials left the bridges connecting Long Island to Manhattan, but bombed everything that led to the mainland. 

Their efforts at quarantining didn’t work.

The last news report Bucky watched before the networks went dark showed walkers and humans alike wading through the shallow channels between Manhattan and the Bronx, and on into the rest of the region.

As if New Jersey would be any better.

New Jersey had _never_ been any better.

* * *

Bucky’s doctors fled mere days after the Avengers left, but although frightened, they were still attentive. He had weeks’ worth of carefully labeled medicines and vacuumed food packs within his reach. 

He was left alone with his nightmares, with no sounds or people to distract him.

In some ways, it was as though he’d never been rescued. It only made sense. Bucky knew people couldn’t be rescued from themselves; only Steve’s stubborn fool’s logic could ever believe that.

On the seventh day of his isolation, he finally felt healthy enough to walk around. He broke out of his floor (so much for Stark tech) to go exploring. Upstairs, he passed through penthouses and grand living rooms. Like a withered plant, he followed the sunlight to the balcony doors. 

Someone else was already out there. A silhouette in denim shorts and bare feet that arched as if wearing invisible heels. The wind whipped through her long red hair as she peered over the landing strip and down at the smoking ruins of Manhattan. They were too far up to hear the growling and tearing and other sounds of dying that Bucky knew permeated the air below.

Bucky sneaked up behind her, quietly, like a cat. His strong arm—the metal one—was around her waist before she noticed him, before she had a chance to freak out and plummet to her death. She flailed in his grasp as he pulled her back, away from the edge. Only once she saw that he wasn’t… that he was alive, and not intending to harm her, did she calm down.

“What the hell were you doing?” he asked roughly. Much as he constantly questioned whether or not he wanted to live, he wasn’t about to let the only person he’d seen in a week die right in front of him. 

“You’re Steve’s friend,” she replied, not answering. “The Wi—”

“The name’s James, but you can call me Bucky,” he said firmly, and let go of her. 

He shouldn’t have introduced himself like that. He didn’t know why he had. He could hardly say it was habit, as he hadn’t introduced himself to anyone at all since coming back to himself. He was no longer that man, and with Steve gone, there was nothing left to tie him to who he had used to be. Instead of being brought back into the world, the world had morphed to match him: alive in body but dead inside, mindless and violent and single-mindedly destructive. 

Yet, here he was, arms wrapped around a pretty lady and telling her to call him by a goofy, anachronistic nickname.

“I’m Pepper,” she said.

He’d heard of her. Steve had told him about his new friends during the fevered hours of his recovery. Bucky remembered only scraps, but a name like Pepper wasn’t easily forgotten. 

Bucky and Pepper. In the forties, they could have been a vaudeville act.

And now that he’d seen her face, there was no chance of him forgetting. Bucky may have been sick, but his eyes worked just fine. Long disused reserves of charm, from a life only recently remembered, caused him to tilt his head and smile—stiff and awkward on lips now more accustomed to scowling than flirting, but a smile all the same.

“How did any Stark boy ever manage to snag a dame like you?” 

Even in the middle of everything, that got a chuckle out of her. 

“Blind, dumb luck,” she answered.

* * *

Together, they explored all the floors above the barricade line, in case there were more stragglers left to join their pity party. 

There was no one.

Pepper helped Bucky move his medicines up to the penthouse. She was still sleeping in the bedroom she must have shared with Stark. Bucky took a guest room. He wasn’t displacing anyone, or overwriting anything. 

He learned a lot of things about Pepper Potts in the ensuing days. He learned that she had valued the vote of confidence that her promotion to CEO had afforded, but had only accepted the job because it was clear Tony needed her to; if she’d had her way, she would have preferred CMO. He learned that she had once dreamed of working for Sotheby’s. Which of Tony’s robot buddies she liked best. That her favorite food was hazelnut puree with some kind of mysterious French dairy product that apparently wasn’t allowed in the States.

He wasn’t sure what she was learning about him in return. He wasn’t sure what there was worth knowing.

They slept with their adjoining bedroom doors open every night, just in case. He listened to her sob. She must have listened to him mutter and thrash.

When morning came, they never mentioned what they had heard.

* * *

Bucky wasn’t like Steve. The world wasn’t a complete shock to him. He’d seen disjointed pieces of lost decades, through the targeting lens of a sniper rifle and in videos provided to him as parts of mission briefs. He didn’t need to be gently guided into the 21st century. He didn’t.

(He did.)

He told himself that he was letting Pepper tutor him for her sake, to keep her occupied. It had nothing to do with him.

Not that it mattered anymore. It was only a few years in, but the 21st century was already over.

* * *

Stark had left his girlfriend enough supplies to last for months, but each evening, Bucky and Pepper looked at the dwindling supplies and knew something was going to have to break.

A month after the Avengers left, Bucky packed two knapsacks that he’d found in Steve’s abandoned closet. 

He went to where Pepper sat, reading papers that no one would ever sign.

“It’s time,” he said.

Her face blanched. “No,” she protested automatically, “we have to keep waiting for them.”

“We’ll leave a note.” 

They both knew the note would yellow and fade before anyone read it.

“Where are we supposed to go?” she asked. “The evacuations ended weeks ago. I can’t…” Her confident demeanor cracked, her in-charge tone cracked. “I can’t.”

Bucky knelt down in front of where she sat and rubbed her knees. “You can. I know you can. And no matter what, I’ve got you. I won’t let you fall.”

She sat staring at him, thinking. Finally, she slumped and said, “I can see why Steve always said he was lucky to have you around.”

“Steve always got things backwards, ma’am. I was the lucky one.”

* * *

The Hamptons was Pepper’s idea. 

Bucky thought it a joke at first, but the more they talked about it, the smarter the plan sounded. Anywhere they could get to west of the city would have already been ravaged—by the millions of previous escapees, and by walkers whose numbers would only have swelled with fresh kills. But Long Island was virtually empty, by all (admittedly outdated) reports.

Getting out of the city would be the hairy part, but Bucky hadn’t spent decades as the world’s deadliest assassin for nothing. And Avengers headquarters wasn’t hurting for weapons. Fuck food, he decided. They could find food later. Fuck everything except as much ammo as they could carry on their backs.

Pepper couldn’t shoot worth a damn; she had an arm that jumped whenever she pulled a trigger and an aim worse than a baby’s. But that was okay. Bucky was a good enough shot for two. Hell, he was a good enough shot for ten. 

Being the only one who knew the streets and layout of 21st century New York, they designated Pepper the navigator and Bucky the muscle. Their partnership worked reasonably well as they picked their way through filthy, corpse-strewn streets and bombed out intersections.

Neither of them had spent any time on the streets since the outbreak, so it took a few tries to figure out how things worked. The… things… didn’t seem able to see or smell them, but noise attracted their notice. Bucky had anticipated this possibility, and had armed himself with a few crossbows in addition to the guns. That friend of Steve’s had left a bunch hanging around. It wasn’t Bucky’s preferred weapon (machine guns had always been more his style), but he was just as efficient with it as with anything else. And he had some silencers in case he needed backup.

After his fifteenth kill, Pepper got over her squeamishness enough to recover the used arrows from the double-dead corpses.

Despite some unpleasantness on the Manhattan Bridge, all went relatively smoothly until they reached Fort Greene. Some intrepid but stupid resident must have set up a booby trap, because as soon as Bucky and Pepper walked into the little pedestrian area in front of what must have once been a popular barbecue place, an alarm went off. A pack of a hundred walkers poured out of the abandoned restaurant right at them, and the noise must have signaled another horde hiding out in the muffin joint across the street.

Bucky’s only thought, as they surrounded him—overwhelmed him—was for Pepper. (Well, that, and the idea of muffin joints having somehow become a thing.) He ran, as fast as his enhanced abilities let him, making as much noise as he could, hoping they would follow him and leave her alone. He screamed at her to stay still, to not make a noise, to get away. He took a wrong turn and found himself backed between scaffolding and a subway entrance, from which even more of the things staggered out. There was an honest-to-god swarm now, and his metal arm would only hold them off for so long. 

Just as he started mouthing the long-forgotten prayers the nuns had taught him, the monsters began looking away. One by one, they fell. It took a minute for Bucky to see why. A minute later, a crowbar sliced the air in front of him, decapitating three of the walkers menacing him with one blow. 

Pepper, her eyes blazing as bright as her hair, stood sweaty and radiant behind the now mutilated bodies. As soon as she saw he was okay, her shoulders relaxed and a bashful blush crept over her features.

“That was absolutely disgusting,” she noted primly.

* * *

“You’ve been holding out on me,” Bucky said later when she had finished explaining about her Extremis ordeal.

“Tony said he fixed it. I thought it was gone, not worth mentioning.”

They decided there must still be some latent triggers, some residual effects that came out when she was stressed or in danger.

For all he knew, Bucky might have the same. The doctors had split too soon to be sure.

“Well aren’t we a pair?” he said with a sad smirk as they made their way down Flatbush Avenue.

* * *

They kept the crowbar. 

From a mansion in Lefferts Gardens, they acquired a couple of swords and a Jaguar convertible.

Pepper was basically set.

“This is the smoothest traffic I’ve ever had getting out to the Hamptons,” she remarked during the eerily solitary drive down Route 27.

It was almost a joke. Almost.

* * *

As predicted, Eastern Long Island was desolate. Free of people, and mostly free of walkers.

Bucky had never been out here before. He liked the look of East Hampton the best, he said after they’d driven through all the towns.

“You have good taste,” Pepper replied.

They holed up in a fancy grocery store called Citarella, which Pepper said would make a good home base until they picked out a more permanent residence. Bucky kept guard while she slept, her face nuzzled into the join of his metal arm and his shoulder. He spent the hours counting all the different kinds of fancy pasta the rich and famous had until recently had to choose from. Back when he was growing up, there’d only been spaghetti and spaghetti.

The next day, they went house hunting. The entire world had become surreal, in so many ways, but choosing among an endless string of mansions took it to a whole new level.

“I like this one,” Bucky said about a small bungalow, easily defensible and with only one possible approach of attack.

Pepper wrinkled her nose. “If money’s no object, I want an indoor pool. Let me show you Diddy’s house. It’s nearby.”

“Who’s Diddy?”

Diddy’s house turned out to be entirely unsuitable. Grandiose, sprawling behemoths were great for society parties, not so good for barricading.

Two days, four zombie kills, and one run-in with anti-social old lady later, they agreed on a set-up acceptable to both his logistical requirements and her creature comforts. It was medium-sized beach house, one of only three down a heavily gated cul-de-sac on the way to Amagansett. An addition housed an indoor lap pool. The cul-de-sac sat on the only elevation in the area, and from the second floor deck, they could see anyone coming. Together they blocked the driveway with furniture and storm-downed trees. 

(It turned out Extremis came in handy for moving logs, too. Bucky felt downright emasculated.)

(And kind of turned on.)

* * *

Weeks went by and they continued not to talk about it. About Steve. About Tony. About anything from the past. They never talked about what it might have been like had they been introduced in a normal way.

Bucky wondered if he and Pepper would have liked one another under normal circumstances. He wondered if they would have been friends. 

Probably not.

Hell, he wasn’t even sure they were friends now, despite sleeping in the same room every night—in twin beds separated by a nightstand. It must have been a little girl’s room, if the glow-in-the-dark stars and purple teddy bears were anything to go by. 

Every night, Pepper refused blankets, despite the late-winter chill. Every night, Bucky woke up in the moonlight and pulled a comforter over her shivering frame.

* * *

They spiced up their weeks with periodic drives out to the towns to stock up on food and supplies. Bucky strapped knives and crossbows to his person, while Pepper walked around with her scabbard slapping her thigh at every step, hand rushing for the sword hilt at every tiny sound they heard. They didn’t run into many of the things—fewer and fewer with each trip. They seemed to have left the area almost entirely.

In some ways, this was a much more manageable introduction into 21st century life than anything else could have been—exploring and learning without the overwhelming crush of people and noises and behaviors. It was a pure observatory experience, an inculcation into a world that was as much of a fossil as himself. Pepper pointed out old locations of interest—a famous art gallery here, the best liquor store there—in the even-tempered tone of a tour guide in a museum. And it all might as well have been a museum—like Roman ruins, empty and deserted and crumbling. Except with the occasional undead assailant.

Bucky had grown up poor and cramped in Brooklyn. Pepper told him that his old block had become a hub of designer shops and artisanal distilleries. She told him that if he’d had a chance to go back, his experience would probably have been like this.

That didn’t make him feel any more normal about wandering through empty antiques shops and choosing among different brands of locally brined pickles, though. Under her tutelage, he was even becoming something of a wine snob, with a preference for Loire Valley whites and Langhe Nebbiolos. He didn’t know himself anymore—but then again, he hadn’t known himself for a very long time. At least this time, he was choosing who to be for himself.

These expeditions were mostly quiet. Bucky hoped Pepper didn’t hold his poor conversational skills against him. From what little exposure to Tony Stark that he had gotten, Pepper must have had a lifetime of nattering.

She showed her appreciation sometimes by falling asleep against his side. 

“I’m glad you found me,” she reassured him one day while they rummaged through a house on the other side of town for new reading material. “I wasn’t going to jump that day, but I wasn’t _not_ going to. I think… I don’t think anyone else would have quite been able to help.”

How she had known that he had been beating himself up inside for not being sophisticated enough to serve as this amazing dame’s only companion in the world, he had no idea. “Just glad to be good for something,” he said.

* * *

Bucky was working on one of those Sudoku puzzles Pepper had shown him how to complete. He’d reverted back to a twelve-year-old boy, sucking on his pencil and straining his brain in pursuit of meaningless exercises.

_4, 1 or 7? 4, 1 or 7?_

Back when he was actually twelve, Steve would have come up behind him, slipped the pencil from between Bucky’s fingers, and filled in the seven for him, getting a poke in his skinny ribs for his trouble.

But Pepper had been reading upstairs all morning, and Steve was most likely dead, so it was up to Bucky, at age 26 or 96 or however the fuck old he was, to figure it out on his own.

He was in the middle of writing in the seven when he heard a delicate cough behind him.

He turned around to find Pepper clad in a white silk blouse, a green secretary skirt, and four-inch heels. It was a big change from the practical sneakers, leggings and tee-shirt she usually wore.

“Going somewhere special?” he asked.

“Yeah, a cocktail party,” she deadpanned.

Bucky looked her up and down appraisingly. That skirt did great things for her legs. Legs that went on for miles. She’d been spending afternoons on the deck, so her freckles were even more pronounced than they had been when he'd first met her. 

Somehow the freckles were even hotter than the legs.

“So this is what you usually look like?” he asked, choosing not to use the past tense of the verb. He had an inkling that’s what she wanted today.

“More or less.”

“Not bad.”

They ate lunch—a sad spread of sardines and canned corn—and then settled back into their activities. This afternoon, however, she joined him in the living room.

“How about a swim?” Pepper asked a few hours later, after many surreptitious glances in his direction.

He shrugged. What else did he have to do? “Sure.”

The previous lady of this house must have been about Pepper’s size, because as a complement to the work outfit, she showed up a minute later in a black bikini that left just the right number of things to the imagination. 

Bucky could tell this all meant something; they’d been here for months, and Pepper had never delved into the closet. She had been having trouble letting go. Bucky couldn’t blame her; she’d had a whole life whereas he’d only restarted an existence. This week, she seemed to be experimenting with something she wasn’t yet ready to openly talk about, not even with him.

This woman must have been a single mom, because there were no men’s clothes to be found anywhere. Everything that hung in Bucky’s corner of the little girl’s closet had come from a raid on the J Crew in East Hampton. The stuff made him feel like a ponce, but trying the clothes on had made Pepper smile, which had left him little choice but to take the outfits she’d picked out for him.

Seersucker fucking bathing trunks with critters on them. Of all the…

If Steve could see him now. He’d probably say that nothing had changed, that Bucky had always been ready to do embarrassing things to see a pretty girl smile.

Bucky and Pepper silently split the pool in half and did laps. She swam furiously, almost as fast as he did. Then again, even without her odd abilities turned on, she had the buoyancy of two human arms to aid her.

After about an hour, they both stopped to catch their breaths. She crossed the invisible lane lines to come stand beside him.

“How does it work?” she asked.

“How does what work?”

“Your arm? Is it attached to your neurons? Is it… I’ve been wondering. I mean, if you don’t want to talk about it, that’s fine, but…”

Bucky forgot sometimes that, despite her more artistic temperament, Pepper had run what basically amounted to a giant R&D company. She had to have some kind of curiosity about this sort of thing. A curiosity that she must have been keeping quiet about for months out of consideration for him.

Bucky was still sensitive about his arm, was still sensitive about everything, but something about Pepper’s manner put him at ease. She oozed kindness, but heavily tinted with a sarcastic edge—like Steve in so many ways. He deserved her as little as he’d ever deserved his previous roommate, but she was stuck with him. They were stuck with each other, though Bucky had a feeling he had the better part of this deal.

“I can talk about it, if you want.” 

She reached out and took his metal hand between her two flesh ones. He could feel the presence of her hands pressing against the metal plates, knew rationally that they were crawling upwards to the joint of his elbow, but he couldn’t feel the tenderness that he could see in her face. He let her splay his fingers open and interlace her own between them. He let her bring their joined hands to her cheek. She leaned into the pressure, a mix of curiosity, exploration and… maybe?... something else.

Instinctively, disgusted with himself, he tried to pull away, but she was stronger than she looked. He was still getting used to that.

“Yours isn’t the first metal arm I’ve met,” she said. “I… I run hot sometimes because of my… my thing. You’re cold. I like it.”

This seemed to be giving her some sort of comfort—was the first time he’d thought it possible to provide _anyone_ with comfort—so he stopped resisting. He let her feel his arm, and even feel beyond the connection to his flesh, and told her about how it worked. She was so close, breath hovering across his back and collarbone while she explored him, with absolutely no judgment or disgust. 

Bucky should have tensed, should have wanted to run, but he let himself lean against the poolside and drink in the smell of her chlorine-scented hair.

* * *

Spring arrived, and Pepper began planting pepper seeds in the front lawn.

“You’re kidding me, right?” Bucky asked when he ran out of the house one morning, in a panicked search after waking up and failing to find her in the other bed. He found her with her skinny ass stuck up in the air, elbow deep in soil.

“What do you call it when you aren’t being ironic, but you still know it’s ridiculous and want to do it anyway?”

Bucky thought. It took him a couple of minutes of sitting in the dewy grass beside her before the answer came to him. “I think it’s called fun.”

* * *

“You said something about Sunday brunch once,” Bucky said one morning when Pepper finally roused herself and joined him in the kitchen.

“…Yes?”

“I want to do it.”

“Oh! Well… well, let me get ready,” she said, sounding understandably surprised.

This was the first time Bucky had suggested an outing; usually, Pepper was the instigator of these semi-nostalgic activities. But he’d been building up his courage, as he’d become more and more at home here, in a stranger’s house that now felt like home, with a strange woman who was now equally familiar to him as he himself was. 

They rode bikes out to Montauk, which Bucky had learned to like for being less… fussy… than the other towns. Where East Hampton was Pepper’s haunt, Bucky could almost picture himself and Steve having been at home in Montauk, with its laid-back shops and old-school, Brooklyn-style delis. They parked in front of a German place on the main drag and killed the errant zombie crawling around inside.

The things had become slower, they’d noticed recently. It was easier to run from them, easier to kill them. They didn’t put up much of a fight anymore. It was as though they’d grown weaker from lack of sustenance. For the first time, they entertained the hope that it might one day be over, that there might be a finality to their undead state. A true death that might allow life to start again.

What they would do with such a life, Bucky wasn’t yet ready to think about. He had only just become comfortable with this half one.

Bucky investigated the kitchen and whipped up some sausages and canned sauerkraut on the grill while Pepper sat at the bar, sword on the table and glass of wine in her hands. When he was done, he put a plate in front of her and then went to sit at the other end of the bar. She followed him with questioning eyes, probably wondering why he wouldn’t sit with her. Bucky always sat with her.

He leaned over the bar to see if the taps worked. Two had dried up but the wheat beer was still flowing. Even better, it was still good. He poured one for himself and then another. He slid the second one down the bar, with a particular flick of his wrist that he hadn’t had cause to use in quite some time. Without spilling a drop, it stopped right beside Pepper’s plate. 

Bucky didn’t know why he was doing this, or why he was doing it today. He’d just woken up more clear-headed than usual, and finally knew there was something he _wanted_ , unnecessary and unrelated to basic survival or mission accomplishment. He had almost forgotten what it was to want, and decided that indulging in this was a final step he shouldn’t run from. Sure, there were a million reasons not to do it, but there had been dangers his whole life. 

“What’s this for?” Pepper asked through batted eyes. Her face was a study in amused disbelief. But unlike the handful of girls who had once upon a time merely laughed at his straightforward attempts at seduction instead of falling for it, her amusement did not result in open-mouthed laughter right into his face. 

She knew what was up, and she wasn’t flinching. But she wasn’t a flincher in general.

“Pretty lady like you without a drink? I couldn’t let that stand.” Bucky raised his glass and nodded a silent toast. “Come here often?”

“No, this is my first time.”

“Mind some company?”

She looked around, even though they were the only two people in the restaurant. “Well, normally, I wouldn’t, but you see, I kind of came here with someone.”

“Boyfriend?”

“No,” she said, drawing out the vowel for longer than she should have, turning a declaration into almost a question.

Bucky took the hesitation as encouragement. “If he isn’t your boyfriend, then it shouldn’t matter what you do.”

“It’s more complicated than that,” she said with a twinkle in her eyes. “I’m already going home with him, so…”

Bucky grinned, simultaneously accepting a combination of defeat and success that tasted more delicious than his breakfast.

* * *

They moved into the master bedroom that night. 

Pepper picked the first of her garden’s harvest the next morning.

The radio, which had remained on, just in case, sputtered with noise for the first time.


End file.
